EVENTS

No contest

If you thought Bambi vs. Godzilla was funny, you might want to witness AronRa battling Pastor Bob Enyart. I give you one representative sample of the back-and-forth:

AronRa wrote:Ignoring for a moment the thousands of creationist arguments which have all been proven wrong a thousand times, yet are still being presented on YEC websites around the world, can you show me one verifiably accurate argument, positively indicative of miraculous creation over biological evolution?

Huh. Since biologists have long known about the First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics, and since physicists have long known about the Theory of Evolution, you’da thunk this problem would have been long discussed at scientific conferences and in scientific papers and such.

P.S. As someone who has a physics background, in my opinion if there were a problem between evolution and the laws of thermodynamics, then it would be evolution which would refute the laws of thermodynamics.

Did you know tha Bob Enyart made a pilot for a sitcom called “The Bob Enyart Show” in 1972, starring Bob Enyart, Bill Daily,, and Lindsay Wagner? ABC bought it and production was scheduled, but at the last minute, Bob Enyart backed out citing artistic differences with the cast. ABC sold the scripts to CBS who hired Bob Newhart to play the part of Bob Enyart. Bill Daily was the only cast member who survived recasting.

Sigh, the deliberately stupid inability to understand the difference between an open system and a closed system that creobots use. They keep failing to understand that the solar system makes a closed system. This fusion reactor 93,000,000 miles away makes the Earth an open system. And with its energy input, entropy decrease to make a tree, wheat, or them, can be overwhelmed so that all exist based on free energy. In other words, free energy change = enthalpy change – temperature times entropy change.

EVEN if the Earth was a closed system, there would have to be enough energy stored in it (somehow, somewhere) for the processes necessary for life (growth, weather and staving off the chill of space) to still be going on today. The battery ain’t dead.

More importantly, it is the process of going from low to high entropy that produces work. EVEN if the Earth were heading downhill towards total entropy, there is nothing that says evolution couldn’t have occurred during this process.

Wow, I guess that’s checkmate. I mean, if only there was some huge source of abundant energy nearby. It would have to be something big, though. Like a big hot ball of plasma undergoing nuclear fusion. If something like that were nearby, that might solve the problem. But I think we’d notice something like that.

You should go to the League of Reason site and jump in on the action. You can’t get in on the debate between Bob Enyart and AronRa, but there are plenty of ceationists just waiting to be abused. You can even get involved in the debate going on in the Peanut Gallery for the AronRa vs. Bob Enyart debate http://www.leagueofreason.co.uk/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=9321&p=141894#p141894

That the creationist interpretation makes life impossible as well would be a problem for creationism only if it were a scientific theory. Since creationism is just a series of contradictionary objections to evolution, the lack of consistency is no matter. What really out to bother them is that disproving evolution in no way proves creationism. The arguments of creationists, like the arguments of climate change denialists, often explicitly refute other arguments they make. That alone ought to convince them that their arguments are wrong but since they’re wedded to a particular result, they aren’t amenable to any other result no matter how illogical their arguments become.

hypatiasdaughter, kosk11348 & jakc: You took the words out of my brain about the YEC version of entropy making life impossible (which obviously nobody would have noticed if it was true, on account of not existing).

Snowflakes too would be impossible if we were ineluctably going towards disorder.

Wow I just read through the entirety of that debate and kind of wish I didn’t. Absolutely, painfully one sided. At one point Enyart’s words just began blurring together because I couldn’t force myself to comprehend his horrible logic anymore. I am curious to see his next reply though for some borderline masochistic reason.

The “Thermo 1&2” argument has been so thoroughly debunked that even the Disco Institute doesn’t use it anymore. In fact, they even urge other creationists not to use it, either.

So the funny part is not that it’s a bad argument. The funny part is that it’s the most famous example of an argument that has “been proven wrong a thousand times, yet [is] still being presented on YEC websites around the world”.

I see your thermo, and raise you the improbability of molecules! Yes, I am serious. I had some Jehovah’s Witnesses come to my apartment, and one of them was (supposedly) a biochem student, who in all seriousness tried to tell me that the process of molecular formation from atoms (strangely enough they ignored nucleosynthesis entirely…) is either an as of yet not understood process, or somehow highly unlikely without the guidance of The Magical Sky Pixie (TM). Funny, them trying to proselytize to a theoretical chemist this way. Oh well, I had some fun with that one. They did at the end try to tell me that the formation of amino acids from some undefined precursors cannot happen due to some insurmountable entropic barrier. I just laughed at them at this point.

Wow, I guess that’s checkmate. I mean, if only there was some huge source of abundant energy nearby. It would have to be something big, though. Like a big hot ball of plasma undergoing nuclear fusion. If something like that were nearby, that might solve the problem. But I think we’d notice something like that.

Come now, that would produce huge amounts of light and heat – why, it might even look like a brilliant orb in the sky too bright to look upon – and that just can’t be, what with all us permanently chilling in near absolute zero temperatures. You know, like you do.

Honestly, you and your bonkers notions. You’ll be saying the world isn’t flat next…

The way I learned it, a closed system exchanges energy but not matter with its surroundings, an isolated system exchanges neither, and an open system exchanges both (so in both closed and open systems, the entropy change alone doesn’t tell if the process is favourable or not). But I often see people using closed when they seem to mean isolated, like in these two comments. Am I missing something?

I mean, if only there was some huge source of abundant energy nearby. It would have to be something big, though. Like a big hot ball of plasma undergoing nuclear fusion. If something like that were nearby, that might solve the problem. But I think we’d notice something like that.

You realize the flaw in that, right? Such an entity would produce lethal amounts of ultraviolet radiation that would destroy all life on earth. In order for it to work, you’d need a layer of something surrounding the earth that would absorb that radiation before it reaches the earth’s surface. Good luck with that!

Every argument I’ve heard from creotards has been a stupid person’s idea of what smart sounds like. At least when they’re trying to shoehorn science into their fantasy they give us a handle to beat them about the head and shoulders with. I think it’s encouraging that pushing faith isn’t a viable sell to the unwashed masses anymore. The fact that they think they have to sound scientific and beat down good science means that the flock is demanding evidence. They aren’t evaluating the evidence for shit but they do want something they can point to and call evidence. The leaders of various religions know the jig is up for the most part, they just need to hang on until they die so they don’t have to find a real job.

The first law of thermodynamics tells us that the total energy in the universe, or in any isolated part of it, remains constant. In other words, energy (or its mass equivalent) is not now being created or destroyed; it simply changes form. Countless experiments have verified this.

A corollary of the first law is that natural processes cannot create energy. Therefore, energy must have been created in the past by some agency or power outside and independent of the natural universe. Furthermore, if natural processes cannot produce mass and energy—the relatively simple inorganic portion of the universe—then it is even less likely that natural processes can produce the much more complex organic (or living) portion of the universe.

I think one of the mistakes people who understand science and evolution make when fundamentalists who are trying to refute evolution is thinking that they believe any argument that seems to use science.
They fundamentally do not believe science at all nor accecpt rational argument.
So they are trying to use what they see as the inconsistencies in science to refute some idea in science. Owing to the fact that they do not understand the basics of science or the rational arguments it makes they use it incorrectly and incompletely, thus sounding completely incoherent.

All of their arguments reject reality in favor of belief. They see reality as chaotic without their god existing.
order = god
They do not believe in the laws of thermodynamics any more that they believe evolution.
only their god is true.

The fact that life is information based accompanied the 1st and 2nd Laws of Thermodynamics as evidence of creation. Not sure why PZ left that out. Anyone willing to discuss those issues is welcome to do it on Bob’s 50,000 watt radio show. I don’t expect any takers, but I figured I’d throw it out nonetheless.

The highlights of the Enyart/AronRa debate were dinosaur soft tissue and genetics. AronRa was wrong on both. Check out DinosaurSoftTissue.com. Fun stuff.

yesyouneedjesus, you are very confused at best, very ignorant in all probability.

Life is life, and information is information—two entirely different things—the former refers to self-replicating metabolic-based physical entities in general; the latter to symbolic data within a semantic field.

Also, the laws of thermodynamics are empirically-based descriptions of aspects of reality which are information, the which itself requires intelligence but not necessarily life.

(And Jesus is a storybook character in an old mythos, much like Darth Vader is a storybook character in a modern mythos)

A corollary of the first law is that natural processes cannot create energy. Therefore, energy must have been created in the past by some agency or power outside and independent of the natural universe. – creobot moron

First, of course, this has nothing whatsoever to do with evolution – but creobot fuckwits are notoriously unable to distinguish evolution from the origin of the universe. Second, the naturalistic alternatives to energy having been created by the Flying Spaghetti Monster or some other imaginary agent are:
1) The first law of thermodynamics does not hold with regard to all natural processes. The first law is induced from empirical evidence, so there could be circumstances in which it does not hold.
Or, more likely:
2) The net energy of the universe is zero.

The fact that life is information based accompanied the 1st and 2nd Laws of Thermodynamics as evidence of creation. Not sure why PZ left that out. – another creobot moron

The fact that life is information based accompanied the 1st and 2nd Laws of Thermodynamics as evidence of creation.

Nope, not even close. You need to demonstrate your imaginary deity/creator exists first. Without that, all you have is fallacious presupposition. (Which is all you have, as there is no evidence for your imaginary deity) Point us to this being/object/material thing. After all, if it interacts with matter, it has to be material, and can be found by the instruments of science.

Life is information based, which shows 2 things. One, information is not physical. Information may be transferred via physical mediums, but the information itself is not physical. You know the magnet letters on the fridge for the kids. Imagine they cover the majority of the fridge face in no particular order or pattern. Letters are at every angle, even upside down. One morning, mom wakes up to find the letters organized into a paragraph of sentences. Information now exists, and no physical properties of the medium have changed. And without any physical evidence, we could say with 100% certainty that the letters were arranged by intelligent design, and not some random natural process like gravity or the wind from the kitchen window. Information is not physical and I don’t believe the naturalist will be able to explain the presence of anything non-physical.

Two, every example of information ever produced or discovered was the result of intelligent design. Since we know that information always comes from a mind, and life is information based, we know life also came from a mind, not some random process.

I gave an explanation above as to why information-based life is evidence for an intelligent designer and special creation. Anyone is free to try and pick it apart.

And the offer to destroy creotard Bob Enyart in front of a 50,000 watt audience is still on the table.

People seem to be misunderstanding my original post. It was meant to say the Bob gave 2 examples of evidences for soecial creation. The 1st and 2nd Laws of Thermodynamics was one and the fact that life is information based was the other. It accompanied his first piece of evidence. That’s what I meant.

lack of understanding of any other way is not evidence. Also can someone please tell me in simple non-stupid English what “information based life” fucking means? If we’re talking about information in the physicists sense wouldn’t that mean everything is information based making it a moot point?

I gave an explanation above as to why information-based life is evidence for an intelligent designer and special creation.

No, you asserted a bunch of nonsense, with nothing to back it up but your ignorance.

I gave an explanation above as to why information-based life is evidence for an intelligent designer and special creation.

Pick what apart? A handful of turds does not a thread make.

But, let’s have some fun; say we accept the possibility of intelligent design: what then? You are, presumably, a Christian; what evidence/argument do you have that it is Yahweh who created the universe and not one of the thousands of other deities invented by humans?

To expand my point, because I’m feeling generous yet pissy; saying that life is information based (almost certaintly conflating terms) means it’s designed because everything we see that is information based (again wtf) is done by an intelligent designer is not evidence. It’s at best inference. it might at BEST be a good reason to look into something but it is not evidence.

It’s also sort of begging the question “is life designed”. By presuming that everything information based is designed therefore life is designed you’re ignoring the big thing of “LIFE”. That’s the questtion: Is life information based without design (again I have no fucking clue what you’re talking about but your logic is fallacious enough that I don’t need to).

Let me demonstrate this problem with a little play involving two characters I’ll named Scientist and Pillock

Scientist: Does this yellow ball have a 4 inch radius?

Pillock: All yellow balls do and it’s yellow therefore it has a 4 inch radius.

Scientist: We measured it…it’s 3

Pillock: You’re wrong, all yellow balls have a 4 inch radius

Scientist: Even if true, clearly this is an exception

Pillock: Nope! Yellow = 4 because a book about a man who lived in a big fish said I’ll be sent to a concentration camp when I die to be molested by fire elementals unless I believe what it says!

Alternatively, a lot of information can be gained by blood splatter or decomposition analysis in forensics. Does this mean the trajectory of blood droplets and the feeding habits of beetles are directed by a god trying to tell us information about the murderer like some cryptic cosmic Sherlock Holmes?

You guys should really carefully read my post and learn what information is before attempting to make a reasonable argument against it. The fact that people think that clouds that look like bunnies, or blood splatter is information is evidence you guys aren’t up on information.

No one has even attempted to address the fact that information is not physical.

Ing, your attempt was a valiant effort, but weak. I’m arguing that information MUST be the result of intelligent design. Go back to the simplistic story of the fridge magnet letters. No one in their right mind would believe the paragraph of sentences came from natural processes.

Refrigerator magnets? Has happened I have seen fridge magnets randomly thrown that spell “HI I AM TOM”

Throw enough magnets enough times at the refrigerator and you will get by sheer probability what you’re looking for. hell we could mathematically map out the odds for it if we simplifying the system as just a random placement from a grab bag and all…

You guys should really carefully read my post and learn what information is before attempting to make a reasonable argument against it.

Since your post clearly demonstrates that you don’t have the foggiest clue what information actually is yourself, you should have taken your own advice and inverted it, and bothered to learn what information ACTUALLY IS before making such a pathetic and ignorant post.

There is no need for any of us to bother making “reasonable” arguments against your drivel, as there is nothing in it that is reasonable that needs to be argued against.

You are free to make up your own definition of information and square-peg it until it fits your blinkered conceptions, but you are not entitled to having others take your efforts therein seriously.

Owl, a cloud that you think looks like a bunny is not information. So far, it is I that has demonstrated knowledge and understanding of information, not you. A plane trail that looks like a pencil to someone is not information. A plane trail that spells out a word in cursive is information and the result of intelligent design.

FFS no it does not! Galileo was right (presuming for the sake of enlargement you accept heliocentric…a leap of faith on my part) not because the Pope got mad at him but because he was fuckign RIGHT. No one’s reaction strengthens or weakens the validity of a position! Unless of course your position was “I bet I can be really really irritating!”

Ing, I said there was a paragraph of sentences on the fridge, not a couple words. Nice try though.

Yes…I know.

That’s how big numbers work. Monkeys on type writers. Address the point. If we flip enough coins enough times we will get 100 heads in a row. We will get 1000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 in a row. That’s how it works.

You guys should really carefully read my post and learn what information is before attempting to make a reasonable argument against it. The fact that people think that clouds that look like bunnies, or blood splatter is information is evidence you guys aren’t up on information.

I think you need to read up on entropy because you clearly don’t understand thermodynamics. Crystals contain very little entropy. Does that imply to you that a quartz geode is a secret communication from jesus?

So far, it is I that has demonstrated knowledge and understanding of information, not you.

You haven’t demonstrated a single iota of knowledge or understanding of information theory. You just want to blather and commit the logical fallacy of special pleading. You fail at making anything resembling a logical argument.

A plane trail that looks like a pencil to someone is not information.

According to information theory, it most certainly is. You don’t get to special-plead your way to the answer you want to assume as your conclusion.

A plane trail that spells out a word in cursive is information and the result of intelligent design.

So… a plane going in one direction is not the result of intelligent design?

That fact that you talk about information and the second law of thermodynamics, and yet think that you have not talked about entropy is yet another demonstration that you have not the slightest clue as to what either of them are or mean. And since the entirety of the rest of your assertions here are based on that vaporware of ignorance, they deserve no further consideration than any other vaporware.

John Morales, please explain how information is physical in my fridge magnet letters example. Did information exist prior to the rearranging of the letters? Did information exist when they were rearranged into paragraphs of meaningful sentences? What changed physically?

I’m arguing that information MUST be the result of intelligent design.

For centuries people wondered about the composition of distant stars. They thought scientists could not ever know (this even until quite recently). But the information was being sent to us all the time:

Baby Jeebus was sending that very information to us in the light of the stars! We just didn’t understand the message, until we fully understood GAWD’S ™ message in the bible.

Actually – strike that last paragraph – we have instead developed devices that could look at stellar spectra and thus allow us to determine the actual chemical composition of distant stars.

If that is not information, then what is? Or are you going to tell me GAWD ™ is sitting on each star creating that information? Isn’t he far more inclined to spend His Godly Days & Nights counting the hairs on your head?

First law: I am the Physics thy ThermoDynamics, who brought thee forth from energy and matter.

Second law: Thou shalt have no other thermodynamics before me.

Third law: Thou shalt argue about Me before unbelievers in the name of the first two laws, and blather about information and intelligent design, even though thou shalt have no idea about what thou are talking about.

You talked about the first and second laws of thermodynamics as evidence for creation. That silly line of reasoning is really based on the second law of thermodynamics, which states that if a compartment is impermeable to matter and energy its contents will proceed toward disorder (entropy).

The usual argument is that entropy would have to decrease in order for evolution to happen, and in fact it does decrease. This is because evolution and abiogenesis were (and are) driven by solar, geothermal and geochemical energy – the biosphere isn’t impermeable to matter or energy.

You seem to have morphed this argument through the assumption that information is something like the opposite of entropy. Its true that a human body has less entropy than a soup of amino acids and nucleotides of a similar size; but a quartz crystal of a similar size has less than either.

If that isn’t what you are talking about then kindly explain what you were talking about when you said this:

The fact that life is information based accompanied the 1st and 2nd Laws of Thermodynamics as evidence of creation

Well, that depends on what version of the definition of “information” one is talking about. If we use YOUR version (which is NOT actually information) then no, life is not based on that. In fact it is the reverse, it is, actually, YOUR version of “information” (which is not actually information) is based on life.

Owl, a cloud that you think looks like a bunny is not information.

Ironically, you do not seem to realize that the cloud that Owl thinks looks like a bunny and your sequence of magnetic letters which you think looks like a paragraph are exactly the same in type and kind.

Its true that a human body has less entropy than a soup of amino acids and nucleotides of a similar size; but a quartz crystal of a similar size has less than either.

I will also just point out as well that if you take all the atoms that make up a human body (or any living organism) and have them rearranged into the prebiotic molecules from which abiogenesis arose, (Mostly H2, CO2, CH4, N2 and a smattering of impurities), that prebiotic collection will have less total entropy than either the soup of amino acids and nucleotides or the living organism.

Biology contains lots of little bumps of decreased entropy, but on the broadest scale from prebiotic chemicals to living organisms to chemical byproducts of life, its an upward slope of increasing entropy.

The second law of thermodynamics actually makes abiogenesis and evolution inevitable.

a bunch of “random” letters on a fridge contain the same amount of information as do the same letters rearranged into sentences. The only difference is that the latter also carries symbolic meaning to humans who speak the language in which the sentence is written.

Note that if the first law is actually a unchangeable law (rather than being physics as currently understood), God is unnecessary for creation. Matter/energy exists eternally.

Similarly, if the second law is actually a unchangeable law (rather than being physics as currently understood), God is impossible (since it must be changing by increasing entropy, which contradicts the definition of God as unchanging)

Of course, physics is more complicated than that, and there are still unanswered questions about how our universe came to be in a low-entropy state to start out with.

I’m sure that if we all pray properly to Boltzmann Megalodon, and think carcharodontous thoughts, it will explain its ineffable mystery to us all.

Light bedtime reading for yesyouneedjesus: Linky. (No Boltzmann Brontosauruses were injured in this article. Though, as you will see, they can be a little misleading.)

yesyouneedjesus, you seem to have a very lazy take on things. Do some reading. What you think is divinely magical is not. Where is your little god going to hide, as we unravel more and more of the “impossible” mysteries of our universe? Why is it that we see beauty, and find knowledge, where you just see a jumble of meaninglessness?

#108 again. John Morales, please explain how information is physical in my fridge magnet letters example. Did information exist prior to the rearranging of the letters? Did information exist when they were rearranged into paragraphs of meaningful sentences? What changed physically?

Two mistakes by Myers in the preview of this thread. Someone on the side of Ra would have titled it, Enyart vs. Ra. The title Bambi vs.Godzilla, followed by Ra vs. Enyart follows the syntax that Ra is Bambi and Enyart Godzilla. Huh, did Myers actually just getting something right?

Thought this bit of humor was worth a follow-up…YYNJ @ ING; the world is dying…”No one in their right mind would believe the paragraph of sentences came from natural processes.”

Correctly stated, everyone in their left mind would believe the paragraph of sentences came from natural processes.

Poof! Just like the universe came into existence. Poof! there it is, Poof! there it is. Nothingness creates itself and by divine supernatural powers sets in motion all the physical properties by which it is self governed. When the whole of science begins with the acceptance that all the energy and matter in the universe remains constant, knowing it is impossible to know this outside of theorizing it to be true, we end up with someone introducing entropy (really?) in a discussion about information.

Well, #136 and 137 pretty much seals it. yesineedtolieforjesus is not, or at least no longer, just stupid, wrong, and ignorant. It has been given ample opportunities, with references and links spoon-fed, to educate itself.

It is clear now that it is just lying. It is deliberately using a false and misleading conception of “information”, which it made up itself, deliberately to fit it into its own blinkered conception of design, and is trying to lure the rest of us into debating on those fake terms and fake parameters, with no intention from the beginning of arguing in good faith.

How ironic that these jesusbots NEVER argue in good faith. You’d think they’d at least know what faith is.

#108 & #137 again. John Morales, please explain how information is physical in my fridge magnet letters example. Did information exist prior to the rearranging of the letters? Did information exist when they were rearranged into paragraphs of meaningful sentences? What changed physically?

John, please answer the questions. As I preemptively put in my original post (#56), information may travel via a physical medium, but the information itself is not physical as demonstrated in my fridge magnet letter example.

I’m starting to realize that naturalists are extremely afraid of information.

And you are afraid of any data/information (they are the same) that doesn’t show your imaginary deity exists. And that is the first step to proving your fuckwitted idea right, show us conclusive physical evidence for your imaginary deity, evidence that will pass muster with scientists, magicians, and professional debunkers, as being of divine, and not natural (scientifically explained), origin. And science explains your inane idea. Try looking here for evidence, not in your book of mythology/fiction called the bible, or with inane and stupid leading questions, which is the first refuge of the informationally incompetent. The competent ones cite the peer reviewed scientific literature.

“I see that yesineedabrain does not understand that least two people have to share a language in order for information can be passed through a book.”

Who said anything about passing information? I’m just talking about the existence of information. You’re acting like an author who pens a manuscript creates no information until it’s submitted for review to the editor. Ummm…no.

Yep, information that exists in the DNA of all creatures without the need for your imaginary deity. That information? And where is your physical information showing your imaginary deity/creator exists? To quote Sgt. Schultz, “I see nothing”.

Amazing where you got this information. I think you pulled it out of your ass.

Yep, just like all the godbots/creobots do. No science, logic, or evidence for their imaginary deity in sight.

of course, since information is in everything. symbolic meaning OTOH only exists in the minds of intelligent life. So if there’s no one to read a book, there’s no symbolic meaning in it.

Instead of refrigerator magnets, how about rocks? Is a pile of rocks information? What about rocks that are rearranged to spell out sentences in English? Is there now information?

you’re boring. the information in a pile or rocks does not increase when you rearrange them (unless you’re counting the rearranging as part of the information; then you’d add such info as vector, speed, etc.). All you’re doing when rearranging rocks into words is also conveying symbolic meaning.

Since you’re afraid of knowledge and refuse to read about Information Theory, I will paste some relevant parts of the wikipedia articles for you:

Information is any kind of event that affects the state of a dynamic system.

From the stance of information theory, information is taken as a sequence of symbols from an alphabet, say an input alphabet χ, and an output alphabet ϒ. Information processing consists of an input-output function that maps any input sequence from χ into an output sequence from ϒ. The mapping may be probabilistic or determinate. It may have memory or be memoryless.

Often information is viewed as a type of input to an organism or system. Inputs are of two kinds. Some inputs are important to the function of the organism (for example, food) or system (energy) by themselves. In his book Sensory Ecology, Dusenbery called these causal inputs. Other inputs (information) are important only because they are associated with causal inputs and can be used to predict the occurrence of a causal input at a later time (and perhaps another place). Some information is important because of association with other information but eventually there must be a connection to a causal input. In practice, information is usually carried by weak stimuli that must be detected by specialized sensory systems and amplified by energy inputs before they can be functional to the organism or system. For example, light is often a causal input to plants but provides information to animals. The colored light reflected from a flower is too weak to do much photosynthetic work but the visual system of the bee detects it and the bee’s nervous system uses the information to guide the bee to the flower, where the bee often finds nectar or pollen, which are causal inputs, serving a nutritional function.

Information is any type of pattern that influences the formation or transformation of other patterns. In this sense, there is no need for a conscious mind to perceive, much less appreciate, the pattern.

A key measure of information is known as entropy, which is usually expressed by the average number of bits needed to store or communicate one symbol in a message. Entropy quantifies the uncertainty involved in predicting the value of a random variable. For example, specifying the outcome of a fair coin flip (two equally likely outcomes) provides less information (lower entropy) than specifying the outcome from a roll of a die (six equally likely outcomes).

Information theory, however, does not consider message importance or meaning, as these are matters of the quality of data rather than the quantity and readability of data, the latter of which is determined solely by probabilities.

Information theory is based on probability theory and statistics. The most important quantities of information are entropy, the information in a random variable, and mutual information, the amount of information in common between two random variables. The former quantity indicates how easily message data can be compressed while the latter can be used to find the communication rate across a channel.

as you can see, information is data, or input. it’s not “meaning”. meaning is irrelevant.

Of course a pile of rocks has information. Every single aspect of their physical state is information; that’s multiple petabytes, at the very least.

The problem for you is that the word “information” has been a technical term for over sixty years, and you are completely ignorant of everything about the discipline in which is is used. Too bad.

What about rocks that are rearranged to spell out sentences in English? Is there now information?

There’s additional information, of course. But your argument fails no matter what, because if you restrict the term to only refer to messages with grammar that humans generate, well, life no more has that than rocks do.

Either rocks and life both have information (by the technical definition), or neither of them do (by the “only human messages” definition).

(and for that matter, if you restrict “information” to only mean “human generated grammatical text”, then pictures, sculptures, and images have zero information. Sketches, doodles, ascii art, the Lascaux cave paintings, Michaelangelo’s David, the Mona Lisa — all have “zero information” by that stupid definition.)

Tethys, I figured somebody might take your approach and of course, all we have to do is change the medium and

No, your point is presuppositional, presupposing your imaginary deity. It isn’t scientific, otherwise you would be citing the peer reviewed scientific literature, and publishing your inane and idiotic work in journals like Nature and Science.

You have submitted your paper for publication in a prestigious scientific journal, right? I gave you submission links above where you can show your honesty and integrity.

It’s funny that you ask if a pile or rocks is information…because as I’ve been trying to point out yes it is, and the question is whether life is information in the same way. When you get down to DNA, yes…in the terms you’re talking about it is exactly like a pile of rocks

Instead of refrigerator magnets, how about rocks? Is a pile of rocks information? What about rocks that are rearranged to spell out sentences in English? Is there now information?

I see that yesineedtolieforjesus continues to insist on using its deliberately dishonest and distorted imaginary conception of what information is, despite having been told many times precisely how wrong it is.

Well done and thank you YYNJ. My ex-wife and best friend was a christian who has been struggling with doubt for a year or two. I showed her this comment thread and your willful ignorance and laughable arguments along with the informed responses from the regular commenters have been the final straws that have enabled her to finally let go of her faith altogether. +1 atheist. Good job.

“It’s funny that you ask if a pile or rocks is information…because as I’ve been trying to point out yes it is, and the question is whether life is information in the same way. When you get down to DNA, yes…in the terms you’re talking about it is exactly like a pile of rocks”

A pile of rocks is information? Wow… There has to be at least 2 dozen comments in this thread that PZ Myers would never utter. Can you get PZ Myers to say on the record that a pile of rocks is information? I would love to get that on record.

A pile of rocks is not information and when you mix up the pile of rocks, you still don’t have information, just still a pile of rocks. Do you mean to tell me that the letters A, C, G and T can be rearranged into any particular order with no consequence? That can be said about a dumb pile of rocks. And since you claim that life is no different, will you go on record stating the order of life does not matter either?

You’re acting like an author who pens a manuscript creates no information until it’s submitted for review to the editor.

Well, if the author penned the manuscript with his eyes closed, without thinking about the words he writes at all, or remembering what he wrote, without reading what he wrote, or ever at any point in the process knowing what he wrote, then no, that author does not create “information” (actually meaning, but let’s humor the liar for now and use its preferred arbitrary language) until someone actually reads what is written.

Otherwise, the author does. But the “information” (meaning) was created inside the author’s brain BEFORE it was even written down. No new “information” (meaning) was added through the act of penning the manuscript. The manuscript is just a means of transmitting the “information” (meaning).

Yes it is. That pile encodes the information about the x,y and z coordinates of every rock in the pile, as well as the mass of each rock, the shape of each rock, the shape of the pile, the properties of each rock, and so forth. A massive amount of information.

and when you mix up the pile of rocks, you still don’t have information,

Yes you do. You now have a different pile rocks encoding a different x, y, and z coordinates for each rock, a different shape of the pile, and so forth.

just still a pile of rocks.

Which encodes information.

Do you mean to tell me that the letters A, C, G and T can be rearranged into any particular order with no consequence?

Every arrangement contains information, and each one contains different information. Because the information is different, the consequences of that information is different. Some of those sequences have the consequence of encoding the information that describes a living organism (if and only if the letters and translated to specific carbon-based molecules). Others of those sequences have the consequence of encoding the information that describes a non-living string of letters.

The number of information patterns that describe living organisms is only a tiny subset of all the possible information patterns there can be.

But of course, yesineedtolieforjesus has already had this explained to it many, many times. It’s just deliberately repeating the same set of tired old lies in a profoundly low-information carrying manner.

A pile of rocks is information? Wow… There has to be at least 2 dozen comments in this thread that PZ Myers would never utter. Can you get PZ Myers to say on the record that a pile of rocks is information? I would love to get that on record.

A pile of rocks is not information and when you mix up the pile of rocks, you still don’t have information, just still a pile of rocks. Do you mean to tell me that the letters A, C, G and T can be rearranged into any particular order with no consequence?

Yes it is it is physical information about the rocks. DNA is physical. It’s information is from it’s physical properties. For the sake of this example it is a pile of rocks

That can be said about a dumb pile of rocks. And since you claim that life is no different, will you go on record stating the order of life does not matter either?

No I said the information of DNA when you look at it from a molecular level is equivalent to the information of a pile of rocks.

A creationist has gone on the record as saying that there is no information in the pyramids, the Taj Mahal, Stonehenge, all the sculpture in the world…
Oh, and also the temple to Yahweh in Jerusalem, and its remnant in the Wailing Wall.

No information.

Not the product of intelligent design.

Funny, I looked up “pile of rocks” on Wikipedia and it was the exact same definition!

I looked up “dumber than a pile of rocks”, and the page redirected to “Creationism”.

Yes. Different rocks contain all sorts of information about how, when, and where they were formed.

I live in the Midwest region of the US. Volcanic debris is a common component of gravels in this area. Even you should be aware that there aren’t any volcanoes in the Midwest region. Can your sophisticated information theory explain where these volcanic rocks came from?

Citation needed, your OPINION isn’t evidence. It is drivel. Why aren’t you citing the scientific literature? Right, you aren’t scientific, can’t be scientific, never will be scientific, as all you have is presupposition that your deity isn’t imaginary. Still no eviedence for your deity. It doesn’t exist without evidence. And by not even trying to show evidence you are tacitly acknowledging it doesn’t exist as you have no evidence for it.

Everyone should become familiar with information before attempting to discuss it. Maybe it’s not the forte of Pharyngula regulars, which is fine. But no one familiar with the field would say that a pile of rocks was information. See the link below for a good explanation of what information is.

Everyone should become familiar with information before attempting to discuss it

As should you. But your link is to a web site that presupposes, rather than showing evidence, that your babble is inerrant rather than a book of mythology/fiction. So it is nothing but lies and bullshit, and anything you present from there is lies and bullshit. Try finding that information in a real place of knowledge, like the science libraries at institutions of higher learning world-wide. It is called the peer reviewed scientific literature.

Still no evidence your deity isn’t imaginary…Typical running away from the important stuff.

When I got to the part about the “laws of nature”, I was already fuming. “Laws of nature” are human-made constructs! They’re our explanations of what we observe! Stop treating them as if the atoms were “reading” them to “know” where to go! Aaaargh!

The rest is pure mythological thinking. Conflating your post-hoc mental organization of the world with some sort of natural order.

Everyone should become familiar with information before attempting to discuss it.

The way that you haven’t, you hypocrite?

But no one familiar with the field would say that a pile of rocks was information.

Your continued lies against art and architecture are noted.

See the link below for a good explanation of what information is.

It’s pretty obvious that the writer of that page, like you, has no idea what he’s talking about.

Especially since he contradicts himself.

We may give a law a name or title, but laws have existed since the origin of the universe.

No, “laws” are what we call observations of physical reality that are constant and consistent enough to be quantified.

Their having existed “since the origin” is a hypothesis, which is supported to a large extent by observations of distant galaxies (which are therefore observations of the distant past). But the degree to which the laws are constant, or whether they can be different at all, is still an open question.

But no one familiar with the field would say that a pile of rocks was information.

my dear, the people who invented the field would say that a pile of rocks was information. That you have to resort to creationist sources, rather than sources from the actual field of information theory, confirms that neither you nor the people who’ve filled your head with falsehoods know anything about information.

We may give a law a name or title, but laws have existed since the origin of the universe.

incorrect. the phenomena we describe with “laws” exist in the currently observable universe, as far back in time as we can see. There’s actually no rule that says that if conditions change sufficiently drastically, these laws still have to hold. It’s just that we haven’t observed that (yet).

because scientific “laws” are not rules that the universe is forced to follow. they’re descriptions of phenomena that have been observed consistently.

Still looking for your conclusive evidence that your imaginary deity exists, and your babble is inerrant LiarForJebus. Given your record of evasion, the blog will be waiting long beyond your meager existence….

Genetic science seems to strongly affirm YesYouNeedJesus when he says that biological life is not so much carbon-based as it is, far more fundamentally, information based.

On this topic PZ’s blog fans (commenters) seem to be half-a-century behind the science. Like carbon, silicon could support lengthy polymers, and the discussion of carbon chauvinism for forty years now illustrates that scientists can postulate in a straightforward, theoretical way, how a non-carbon-based biological life form could function. In fact, the next time atheists really want to show that they don’t need God to create life, there efforts would be more credible if they tried making something living out of silicon, instead of just tweaking some existing carbon-based organism. (The last atheist who said he could make life without God’s help grabbed a handful of dirt, and God said, “Hey, you get your own dirt.”)

So, it’s relatively straightforward to create a non-carbon-based life form schematic. But to lay out a theoretically functional diagram for how a biological life form could live and reproduce while possessing NO genetic information, that’s something that would win someone a Nobel Prize. So, we can understand conceptually how you would do without the carbon, but we have not been able to posit how you could do without information.

Thus, the experience of all of the scientific community to this day strongly affirms YesYouNeedJesus, in observing that it is far more fundamental to say that life is information based.

Genetic science seems to strongly affirm YesYouNeedJesus when he says that biological life is not so much carbon-based as it is, far more fundamentally, information based.

it does no such thing. As already noted, you lot have no idea what information is, and keep on trying to conflate it with “symbolic meaning”. But of course, life is not based on symbolic meaning. And it’s no more “information-based” than everything else physical in the world, since everything physical contains information.

On this topic PZ’s blog fans (commenters) seem to be half-a-century behind the science.

incorrect. we’re the ones who understand what Information theory is about, while you’re desperately trying to conflate it with “symbolic meaning”.

Like carbon, silicon could support lengthy polymers, and the discussion of carbon chauvinism for forty years now illustrates that scientists can postulate in a straightforward, theoretical way, how a non-carbon-based biological life form could function.

irrelevant. All life known to date is carbon-based. Other life can be based on something else, but we haven’t found that yet, so it’s pure speculation at this point.

In fact, the next time atheists really want to show that they don’t need God to create life, there efforts would be more credible if they tried making something living out of silicon, instead of just tweaking some existing carbon-based organism.

(The last atheist who said he could make life without God’s help grabbed a handful of dirt, and God said, “Hey, you get your own dirt.”)

clever, except for the part that “god” didn’t create “dirt”. Carbon is made wholly naturally in stars, and “dirt” AKA “soil” is actually made by life, not the other way ’round. All the stuff life is made from comes about entirely without need for divine interference.

But to lay out a theoretically functional diagram for how a biological life form could live and reproduce while possessing NO genetic information, that’s something that would win someone a Nobel Prize.

the genetic code is not symbolic meaning, either. it’s a string of chemicals that can duplicate and start chemical reactions that lead to proteins. it’s not symbolic meaning, either.

Thus, the experience of all of the scientific community to this day strongly affirms YesYouNeedJesus, in observing that it is far more fundamental to say that life is information based.

DNA is “information” the same way any other chemical reaction is. it’s not symbolic.

clowns. learn what the ideas you’re abusing mean before you try to argue with people much better educated than you.

Genetic science seems to strongly affirm YesYouNeedJesus when he says that biological life is not so much carbon-based as it is, far more fundamentally, information based.

it does no such thing. As already noted, you lot have no idea what information is, and keep on trying to conflate it with “symbolic meaning”. But of course, life is not based on symbolic meaning. And it’s no more “information-based” than everything else physical in the world, since everything physical contains information.

On this topic PZ’s blog fans (commenters) seem to be half-a-century behind the science.

incorrect. we’re the ones who understand what Information theory is about, while you’re desperately trying to conflate it with “symbolic meaning”.

Like carbon, silicon could support lengthy polymers, and the discussion of carbon chauvinism for forty years now illustrates that scientists can postulate in a straightforward, theoretical way, how a non-carbon-based biological life form could function.

irrelevant. All life known to date is carbon-based. Other life can be based on something else, but we haven’t found that yet, so it’s pure speculation at this point.

In fact, the next time atheists really want to show that they don’t need God to create life, there efforts would be more credible if they tried making something living out of silicon, instead of just tweaking some existing carbon-based organism.

(The last atheist who said he could make life without God’s help grabbed a handful of dirt, and God said, “Hey, you get your own dirt.”)

clever, except for the part that “god” didn’t create “dirt”. Carbon is made wholly naturally in stars, and “dirt” AKA “soil” is actually made by life, not the other way ’round. All the stuff life is made from comes about entirely without need for divine interference.

But to lay out a theoretically functional diagram for how a biological life form could live and reproduce while possessing NO genetic information, that’s something that would win someone a Nobel Prize.

the genetic code is not symbolic meaning, either. it’s a string of chemicals that can duplicate and start chemical reactions that lead to proteins. it’s not symbolic meaning, either.

Thus, the experience of all of the scientific community to this day strongly affirms YesYouNeedJesus, in observing that it is far more fundamental to say that life is information based.

DNA is “information” the same way any other chemical reaction is. it’s not symbolic.

clowns. learn what the ideas you’re abusing mean before you try to argue with people much better educated than you.

Thus, the experience of all of the scientific community to this day strongly affirms YesYouNeedJesus, in observing that it is far more fundamental to say that life is information based.

You have that backwards: life (indeed, all physical phenomena) can be described, because biology is chemistry and chemistry is physics and physics describes that which is physical and physics can be described.

(The last atheist who said he could make life without God’s help grabbed a handful of dirt, and God said, “Hey, you get your own dirt.”)

You garbled the (extremely tired and weak) joke. It’s supposed to be a scientist, not specified as being an atheist. It makes no sense to have a contest with an entity you don’t believe exists, and even saying “get your own dirt” would demonstrate existence.

Genetic science seems to strongly affirm YesYouNeedJesus when he says that biological life is not so much carbon-based as it is, far more fundamentally, information based.

I note that your support of your fan is extremely limited and qualified.

Do you in fact realize that everything — including the argued “pile of rocks” — contains information, according to the definition of information used in information theory?

Or are you, like your fan, so committed to a wrong, stupid, and inherently useless (for the argument from “intelligent design”) definition of “information” that you will even implicitly reject art and architecture as being the result of intelligent design?

Hello JadeHawk (Hey, I’m glad to see that your post appears twice. I posted earlier, and it appeared twice. My post is awaiting moderation and it was about Aron quitting our debate, along with links at our realsciencefriday site to /ra and /pz and my debate that attracted Dan Styer, the author of the Am Jour of Phy article Evolution and Entropy, to the comment thread, at our /entropy page. Hope that post shows up.

Regarding your claim that DNA information is “not symbolic,” don’t you agree that a properly formed nucleotide triplet that is “understood” by the translation service as a stop codon has the symbolic meaning that the transcription, which physically could continue on, should stop right at that point? Certainly, the discoverers of DNA disagree with you and indicated that the DNA code is not an analog for written language, but that it is written language. And of course, in language, the letters that form words are performing symbolic functions, not themselves possessing the substance of the meaning that we attribute to the words they form. In other words, a stop codon doesn’t have the chemical property to PHYSICALLY stop a translation, rather, it MEANS stop!

Physical properties of water molecules go a long way toward explaining the various structures they form (ice crystals, a vortex, a cloud, etc.). But the physical properties of ink do not explain the plot of a book, nor do the physical properties of amino acides and the DNA backbone, etc., explain the sequencing of nucleotides in living organisms.

Bobenyart, you show the same lack of cogency as LiarForJebus did. If you are going to claim your imaginary deity exists, you must show conclusive physical evidence for it, evidence that will pass muster with scientists, magicians, and professional debunkers, as being of divine, and not natural (scientifically explained), origin. Something equivalent to the eternally bush. Or, if you are a person of honesty and integrity, you shut the fuck up about your imaginary deity without said evidence. Welcome to science, where the burden of evidence is upon you, the claimant, not those attempting refute you (that is religious argumentation).

Religion and religious belief cannot refute science. Only more science can do that. Where is your science? Cite the peer reviewed scientific literature to show it.

Show a human a stop sign, a peice of paper with the word “stop” written on it, a computer screen with electrons arranged to show the word “stop”, kitchen magnets spelling “stop”, or a pile of stones arranged to spell “stop”, and the human understands that they all mean the same thing.

Show a ribosome a piece of paper with the stop codon written on it. Does it stop translating? How about an electronic signal? Kitchen magnets? Rocks? How about even a DNA chain with the stop codon in it? How about ANYTHING OTHER THAN A mRNA CHAIN WITH THE EXACT THREE MOLECULES THAT MAKE UP THE STOP CODON?

Does it cause the ribosome to stop?

No?

Then the stop codon is not “symbolic”. It is physical. The symbolism was added AFTER THE FACT, by humans. Even the name “stop codon” was symbolism added after the fact by humans.

That “stop codon is symbolic” argument has got to be among the most ridiculous and asinine I’ve seen in a long long time.

Certainly, the discoverers of DNA disagree with you and indicated that the DNA code is not an analog for written language, but that it is written language.

I strongly suspect that you’re lying, or (more charitably) you’re transmitting a lie that some other creationist told.

Or in other words, [citation needed].

In other words, a stop codon doesn’t have the chemical property to PHYSICALLY stop a translation, rather, it MEANS stop!

To whom does it mean ‘stop’? Are you claiming that the transcription system is itself a mind?

But the physical properties of ink do not explain the plot of a book, nor do the physical properties of amino acides and the DNA backbone, etc., explain the sequencing of nucleotides in living organisms.

Well, you do need to take into account the contingent and cumulative effect of evolution on that sequencing.

Also, it was just a couple years ago that NASA was all worked up about a non-phosphorus life form.

My point is not that anyone would be successful building, or even designing an actually-functional non-carbon life form. But rather, WE KNOW HOW TO TALK ABOUT IT. My challenge is to try to get your to acknowledge that it is extremely difficult to EVEN THINK ABOUT how to lay out a theoretically functional diagram for how a biologically reproducing life form which possessed NO genetic information. We can do that, theoretically, for no carbon, or no phosphorus (i.e., try silicon, try arsenic, etc.). And you don’t win a Nobel Prize for making a cogent argument for how a silicone-based DNA might be possible in a cold methane environment. But someone just might win a Nobel Prize if they could show how biological life could function without information. Now, that’d be fun!

Can you show conclusive physical proof that the laws of logic are valid?

Can you show they aren’t? Why aren’t you showing your imaginary deity exists with solid and conclusive physical evidence? Only one reason…It doesn’t exist, and you know you are blowing flatuence out of of your ass with each and every post. You are shown to be what you are, a liar and bullshitter.

To all godbotting trolls. Either produce direct and conclusive physical evidence for your imaginary deity or shut the fuck up about it. If you have honesty and integrity, you will do either of the above. Otherwise, if you can’t put up, and can’t shut up, you are tacitly acknowledging you are lying and bullshitting. See how easy logic is without presuppositions…

Because any and every attempt at evasion is tacitly acknowledging the gnu atheists are right and there is no evidence for your deity. Simple to refute the gnu atheist. Oops, where is that conclusive physical evidence? Metaphysical philosophy (mental masturbation) is the realm of the bullshitters. So physical evidence is required for to show the gnu atheists are wrong. Still waiting…

Actually, it is irrelevant, as the laws of logic are man-made as your imaginary deity doesn’t exist, never did exist, never will exist. Otherwise, you would lead with the physical evidence. What a loser if you think otherwise LiarForJebus.

Can I ask you to take your own test? And we can use your own test on your own test. So, let’s see if your claim has any meaning, apart from a description of it?

JM: “The central conceit these creationist clowns try to advance is that THINGS [that] CAN BE DESCRIBED ARE THEREFORE BASED ON THEIR DESCRIPTION and thus without having a description they could not exist. (How do they not see how backwards this is?)”

John, your argument is not physical, but conceptual. Ideas are not made of matter. In fact, Einstein was perplexed for decades over the impassable gulf between matter and ideas. (See http://AmericanRightToLife.org/Einstein .)

Sand on a beach can correctly be viewed as matter, and if measured in some way by an observer, it can be viewed as representing data (mass, weight on Earth, depth). But just like the order of the silicone atoms in sand, and the grains on the beach, the particular ordering of them is not crucial to the existence of the beach. Information, on the other hand cannot survive the random shuffling of its components. (I think this is also true of things built from information, i.e., blueprints.)

I’ve noticed, perhaps you have to, that atheists are very uncomfortable with the reality of the laws of logic, with the existence of truth, and information.

My challenge is to try to get your to acknowledge that it is extremely difficult to EVEN THINK ABOUT how to lay out a theoretically functional diagram for how a biologically reproducing life form which possessed NO genetic information.

Unlike you, I have no difficulty separating map from territory, and I deal with concepts not their labels — that is, I don’t imagine terminology is the same as that to which it refers.

In this case, the label “genetic information” refers to that physical component with which “a biologically reproducing life form”* reproduces; it’s not just “extremely difficult to EVEN THINK ABOUT”, it’s incoherent, because it’s akin to thinking about a circle without circularity.

In short: that’s no challenge; it’s a joke!

—

* The redundancy there indicates your lack of knowledge (you’ve essentially written a “life-form-like reproducing life form”)

Can you please provide a consistent definition of the word ‘information’ as you’re using it? I’m aware of at least two significantly different definitions (both of which have been covered in this thread), but you don’t seem to be using either. Frankly, it almost seems as though you’re using both definitions interchangeably depending on which one does more to support your argument at the moment.

Guys, it’s been fun! But nearby there is a Planned Parenthood abortionist preparing to dismember a 14-week old little girl in the morning, and I’ve got to go meet with some superhero friends of mine, sort of like a modern underground railroad avengers group (only w/o the vengeance), to try to figure out how to save her. Please pray for us.

Really? So can theories on the origin of the universe, abiogenesis, and descent with modification contradict the laws of logic?

What imaginary deity-given laws of logic? I refuse to play your presuppositional game. Show the imaginary deity exists, or shut the fuck up with presuppositions that is does. Welcome to logic 101. Easy, either you have the data and and cite it, or you are a liar and bullshitter.

I assumed by your statement that you were asserting the existence of the laws of logic.

What imaginary deity-given laws of logic?

Maybe I was wrong to assume.

This is getting good. Do you either:

A. Deny the existence of the laws of logic
or
B. Assert that theories on the origin of the universe or abiogenesis or descent with modification can contradict the laws of logic like the law of non-contradiction?

I assumed by your statement that you were asserting the existence of the laws of logic.

What laws of logic, since your imaginary deity doesn’t exist. They were man-made if they exist.

Assert that theories on the origin of the universe or abiogenesis or descent with modification can contradict the laws of logic like the law of non-contradiction?

Since your imaginary deity doesn’t exist, and the laws of logic dont’ exist, what is your problem? Why aren’t you showing solid and conclusive physical evidence for your imaginary deity instead of fuckwitted and irrelevant metaphysical mental wanking? The only reason is that you have no solid and conclusive physival evidence and must find something to deflect logic from the fact that you don’t have any evidence..

Thanks for playing, as you prove the point of the gnu atheist with every post that lacks that conclusive physical evidence. In other words, you lie and bullshit with every time you speak…

Are you saying there are no universal laws of logic? What about the law of non-contradiction?

What we are saying your “laws of logic” are presuppositions of delusional fools who think imaginary deity exist without solid and conclusive physical evidence. In other words, abject losers like yourself who can’t acknowledge the truth: They are liar and bullshitters for their delusions…

Oh, and in case you presuppositional fuckwits don’t know, several fuckwitted creobots have used “rules of logic” against us without any success. The idea is that easy to refute, as all you can do is repeat the lies and illogical presupositions. I feel sorry for you with such feeble ammunition. Does it ever leave the barrel of your gun?

Regarding your claim that DNA information is “not symbolic,” don’t you agree that a properly formed nucleotide triplet that is “understood” by the translation service as a stop codon has the symbolic meaning that the transcription, which physically could continue on, should stop right at that point?

Certainly, the discoverers of DNA disagree with you and indicated that the DNA code is not an analog for written language, but that it is written language.

incorrect.

In other words, a stop codon doesn’t have the chemical property to PHYSICALLY stop a translation, rather, it MEANS stop!

exactly backwards. a stop codon has chemical properties that release the peptide chain, but it doesn’t carry any symbolic meaning at all.

But the physical properties of ink do not explain the plot of a book, nor do the physical properties of amino acides and the DNA backbone, etc., explain the sequencing of nucleotides in living organisms.

actually, the physical and chemical properties of DNA, RNA, and tRNA are what creates the physical and chemical properties of the peptide chains that form from them.

you are extremely ignorant of genetics.

But nearby there is a Planned Parenthood abortionist preparing to dismember a 14-week old little girl in the morning

and this of course is just a lie. but I wish the poor woman you’re planning on harassing that the escorts at the clinic do their job well and the patient doesn’t need to suffer your abuse.

I’ve noticed, perhaps you have to, that atheists are very uncomfortable with the reality of the laws of logic, with the existence of truth, and information.

you’ve “noticed” no such thing, on account of it not being true. However, people who know what logic, truth, and information actually are are very annoyed at stupid people like you who abuse and misapply these concepts.

What about the law of non-contradiction?

light is both a particle and a wave. which means light is both a wave and not a wave (and it’s also a particle and not a particle)

But nearby there is a Planned Parenthood abortionist preparing to dismember a 14-week old little girl in the morning, and I’ve got to go meet with some superhero friends of mine, sort of like a modern underground railroad avengers group (only w/o the vengeance), to try to figure out how to save her. Please pray for us.

Didn’t we – last year – find out that the liar yesyouneedjesus is one of Enyart’s paid employees, or something like that ?

Yyhj isn’t going to admit they’re wrong, not in the least. His livelihood, indeed his entire way of life, depends on gpdbotting.

And why anyone is even willing to speak so much as one word to the convicted child-abuser Bob Enyat, I don’t know. He should be totally shunned by all rational society. The fact that he’s still alive is evidence that there is no god. Or at least no “good god” of the type he pretends to believe in.

Please keep records of how many days your health-care facility in Denver is terrorized by that piece of filth Bob Enyart. I pledge to donate a substantial sum to your Denver branch for each day he appears at your facility there to advocate for forced childbearing and slavery for women.

Yeah, I get that. And none of that requires actually speaking TO him; all can be accomplished by speaking over his head.

Which, since reason and evidence are going over his head anyways, no loss. Only requires the minor adjustment of which pronouns/which person’s viewpoint is being addressed.

Ie, instead of “Bob, you filth, you’re wrong because of …”
we can use “Notice how Bob, the filth, is wrong because of … ”

And some are already doing that, anyways. I’m proposing that we – all of us who can – make it our “official” policy to quit directly addressing the filthy child-abusing liar Bob Enyart. He should be shunned. He shouldn’t get even the tiny little bit of reinforcement he gets from being argued with. It makes him feel important, that someone took the time to respond TO him. He doesn’t deserve even that much.

I note how Tethys and I posted simultaneously @8:43 pm — we both indicated the resort to topical derailment; the post was about the pathetic (and utterly wrong argument in any case) from thermodynamics that creationists employ.

(That some people actually accept that claim illustrates some of the harm religiosity does)

Can’t question the facts, can’t question their basis, so they resort to ostensibly (but (ironically) presuppositionally) questioning epistemology as they frantically back-pedal away from the former.

Show a human a stop sign, a peice of paper with the word “stop” written on it, a computer screen with electrons arranged to show the word “stop”, kitchen magnets spelling “stop”, or a pile of stones arranged to spell “stop”, and the human understands that they all mean the same thing.

Quite aside from the creobots’ conflation of information with meaning, even meaning is ultimately physical. Meaning is nothing more than a physical reaction in a brain to external stimuli, conditioned by countless previous such interactions. So even if information really equaled meaning, it would still be physical.

In other words, a stop codon doesn’t have the chemical property to PHYSICALLY stop a translation, rather, it MEANS stop!

Nonsense. A stop codon is a stop codon precisely because it has the chemical properties required to effectively and PHYSICALLY bind a release factor (rather than a charged aminoacyl-tRNA like the remaining codons) which makes the translation stop and releases the peptide chain. PHYSICALLY. CHEMICALLY. No “means stop” about it.

FFS. First information theory, now biochemistry… Like Jadehawk said: “clowns. learn what the ideas you’re abusing mean before you try to argue with people much better educated than you.”

As much as I love the filename “nothing.html”, that page leaves out something important: the lifetime of a quantum fluctuation, the time till its borrowed energy must be paid back to the vacuum, is indirectly proportional to its energy. Indeed, heavier particles are much less common among virtual particles than lighter ones. So… the lifetime of a quantum fluctuation with zero energy is infinite.

every example of information ever produced or discovered was the result of intelligent design.

Take a box (or truck) of big and small things: nuts, cornflakes, whatever. Then open it.

You’ll find that the big ones are on top and the small ones on the bottom.

When such things are shaken, holes temporarily open between them; the small ones can fall through, the big ones can’t. This sorts them. Gravity, not intelligent design.

And yes, of course that’s information. When you see the big ones on top, that tells you that the small ones are on the bottom!

I so love it when godbots use Newtons Laws as proof and then demonstrate that they have zero comprehension of them.

Not that it matters, but thermodynamics has nothing to do with Newton.

I’ve never “talked about” entropy. I merely mention the 2nd Law. I never talked about it. I’ve talked about information.

I think that’s the funniest excuse I’ve ever seen!

Oh, wait, it’s about at the same level as…

…ah, yeah. Found it:

Bush & Co. were warned an attack was coming in a Presidential Daily Briefing with the (Apparently confusing and cryptic) title of “Bin Laden determined to strike in the US” a month in advance of 9-11. Condi clarified that with something along the lines that the PDB didn’t really mean bin Laden is determined to strike in the US, only that bin Laden is determined to strike in the US. You can see there’s a world of difference hinging on what the meaning of the word is is. Understandably then, with that confusion over italics, the White House had to extend their vacation to reflect on the mysterious is. After much brush clearing and meditation on nearby fairways and greens, they finally concluded the best course of action would be to cover up the fact that they received that glaring red flag in the first place.

Are you proud, yesyouneedjesus? You’re at the same level as Condoleezza “Sovietologer” Rice!

So you’re saying they’re *sunglasses* attracted?

Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeah!

:-D :-D :-D

It is clear now that it is just lying. It is deliberately using a false and misleading conception of “information”, which it made up itself

LOL, no. The conception is copypasta from an authority.

Instead of refrigerator magnets, how about rocks? Is a pile of rocks information? What about rocks that are rearranged to spell out sentences in English? Is there now information?

How much information do you need to describe the pile of rocks (in enough detail that it can be distinguished from every other possible pile of rocks)?

How much information do you need to describe the sentence spelled out in rocks?

…Turns out the pile contains a lot more information than the sentence, unless the sentence is really long indeed.

Dang, I’ll have to add another internet to Owlmirror’s collection for #172.

Seconded. *goes bake lavender cookies to make Internet out of*

Well done and thank you YYNJ. My ex-wife and best friend was a christian who has been struggling with doubt for a year or two. I showed her this comment thread and your willful ignorance and laughable arguments along with the informed responses from the regular commenters have been the final straws that have enabled her to finally let go of her faith altogether. +1 atheist. Good job.

No, only quite short ones, and even then only at very low temperatures (which slow everything down rather drastically) and in the absence of things like molecular oxygen.

(The last […] [scientist] who said he could make life without God’s help grabbed a handful of dirt, and God said, “Hey, you get your own dirt.”)

Funny, then, that clay is an alumosilicate.

The rest of soil, as Jadehawk pointed out, is made by life. That’s why there isn’t any in extreme deserts.

Regarding your claim that DNA information is “not symbolic,” don’t you agree that a properly formed nucleotide triplet that is “understood” by the translation service as a stop codon has the symbolic meaning that the transcription, which physically could continue on, should stop right at that point?

Oh, there are yet more errors in here that haven’t yet been answered.

You’ve confused transcription and translation. Transcription = making an mRNA copy of DNA; translation = making a protein copy of mRNA.

Transcription doesn’t care about stop codons or any codons. It is stopped in a different way: at a variable distance behind the stop codon, there’s a region (with one of several similar sequences) to which a protein binds (by electrostatic attraction as always); the transcription machinery (RNA polymerase) bumps into that protein and falls off. As long as this barely metaphorical roadblock is there, it physically cannot go on transcribing.

Yet more mechanics!

Also, it was just a couple years ago that NASA was all worked up about a non-phosphorus life form.

Yeah, the final refutation was published a few weeks ago.

That’s not surprising. The very reason arsenic oxides are poisonous is that chains of arsenate fall apart on their own in water, while chains of phosphate don’t.

Can you show conclusive physical proof that the laws of logic are valid?

Logic is an abstraction of how mathematical objects behave.

Mathematics is an abstraction of how physical objects behave.

Redox oceans and asteroid bombardment are impossible to recreate in the lab.

On a small scale, you can get close enough.

my PZ Myers Trochlea Challenge, which PZ humbly admitted he could not answer

Duuuuude. We had a whole thread about that. Look it up and read it!

*off to donate to Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains*

Yay, they accepted my credit card! (Truncated my name, though, LOL.)

Yeah, I get that. And none of that requires actually speaking TO him; all can be accomplished by speaking over his head.

[…]

Ie, instead of “Bob, you filth, you’re wrong because of …”
we can use “Notice how Bob, the filth, is wrong because of … ”

No. That’s the exact same thing, except the latter is passive-aggressive. I prefer being openly aggressive.

Besides, I don’t really get the concept of “doesn’t deserve to be talked to”. No matter what an asshole Enyart is, he’s still wrong on the Internet, and he’ll keep being wrong on the Internet and teaching wrongness to others for at least as long as we don’t do anything against that.

It makes him feel important, that someone took the time to respond TO him.

I see LiarForJebus is still playing inane word games. LFJ, your “laws of logic” are absolute and given to mankind by your imaginary deity; that is the meaning you use, and it is that meaning which is *POOF* rejected as per Christopher Hitchens, “that which asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence”. You see, LiarForJebus, your absolute “laws of logic” don’t exist until you can demonstrate the existence of your imaginary deity. Simple logic, removing your attempts to get a presupposition agreed to. And still no evidence for your imaginary deity from you LiarForJebus. Tsk, tsk, just not up to the task of put up or shut the fuck up. Typical of liars, bullshitters, and godbots.

Atheists “laws of logic” are man-made philosophical constructs explaining simple logic. The man-made “laws of logic” need no such proof to be considered what they are, descriptions of a process. The can’t be *POOF* dismissed as nonsense. Hence, they are the definition we use here. These “laws of logic” exist.

Why aren’t you blockquoting what I said, and giving the post number. That is something called evidence, which shows your duplicity.

Check #286 fuckwitted LiarForJebus. What I said was that your laws of logic don’t exist. Due to the presupposition of your unneeded and non-existent deity. Until you show conclusive physical evidence for said imaginary deity. We’re still waiting….

It’s always interesting to see where the atheist will go when confronted with a challenge. On this site, vulgarity is the obvious first choice. The second choice is insane statements like “the laws of logic don’t exist” or “everything is information”.

Of course, when you create your own definition, everything is everything. My original example included information that was a message created by intelligent design. There was no physical evidence that it was created by intelligent design, but no one here would deny that fact. And no one here would claim it happened by natural processes. And I seriously hope that everyone here would acknowlege that there’s a difference between random letters on a fridge and a designed informative message with those letters.

No one would ever argue that the code behind a complex piece of software could originate randomly, yet they do with the even more complex code behind life. I don’t understand. Even a message on a beach consisting of just 3 letters (SOS) would be acknowledged by everyone here as “design”. And no one in their right mind would claim that given enough time, Mt. Rushmore would happen as a result of wind, rain and erosion.

And of course information itself is not physical. A message written in sand changes not any physical properties of the sand prior to rearrangement. Even though the physical characteristics do not change, we have evidence of intelligent design, that even members of this forum would not deny.

It is stopped in a different way: at a variable distance behind the stop codon, there’s a region (with one of several similar sequences) to which a protein binds (by electrostatic attraction as always); the transcription machinery (RNA polymerase) bumps into that protein and falls off.

That’s one way. There’s another, in which there’s a region after the stop codon that consists of a sequence of nucleotides that, when transcribed, lead to the formation of a particular three-dimensional structure (hairpin loop followed by a string of uracils) in the mRNA transcript. This structure hinders the progression of the RNA polymerase (because it binds it tightly) and weakens the RNA-DNA interaction (because lots of A-U base pairs in a row make the duplex unstable), causing the whole complex to dissociate.

I recently spent eleven days sitting at an intersection in central Montana to enforce a road closure in effect because of a wildland fire. Not 100 yards away was a small cliff — sandstone, mudstone, siltstone, conglomerate and limestone. The mudstone and siltstone was lensed, the sandstone in either wide thin non-laminated sheets or in thicker laminated and/or crossbedded blocks, the limestone in wide thick beds, and the conglomerate in very small lenses. Beautiful cliff. Naturally formed.

Yet that naturally formed cliff contained information. It tells the story of a late Campanian or early Maastrichtian flood plain. As the (what we now know as) Rocky Mountains were being uplifted (multiple orogeny events), rain fell on the mountains eroding rocks as well as clay and sand particles. These rocks and particles were carried by rivers down to a coastal plain bordering an inland sea covering much of the great plains.

Each river had its own channel. The channel was filled with crossbedded sand bars. In some places, small rocks and pebble accumulated as the water slowed down and no longer had the energy to keep moving the heavier pieces — and the larger pebbles are dropped first, the smaller ones later. The river sorts the sand and gravel. We know this because the crossbedding of the sandstone and the deposition of the gravel is exactly the same as the crossbedding found in rivers today. And we can use that knowlege of today’s rivers to reconstruct the river systems of the late Campanian — which way they flowed, how big they were and how intermittent and variable the water flow was.

In the slowest parts of the river, clays and other very small particles accumulated. These built up in thin layers as each year’s wet season increased the erosion in the highlands. Some areas show far less layering because of animals and plants — bioturbation. Again, this is exactly the same conditions found in modern rivers and streams.

There are wide but thin sandstone sheets deposited during floods. When the Mississippi breaks through a levee (natural or man made), it carries debris with it. Some of this debris is sand — small hard particles of quartz and other minerals. As the floodwaters recede, a thin layer of sand is left on the floodplain exactly as it was 75 million years ago in what is now central Montana.

The thick and broad beds of limestone, interleaved with siltstone and mudstone, are from the lakes and ponds that were filled during the wet season and, during the dry season, either evaporated or became much smaller. Ponds and lakes like this exist along rivers that still have natural flood plains. The sediments and the microfauna in the lakes today are creating what will someday be a similar geologic formation.

We can reconstruct the ecosystem, the climate and the landscape by using the information within the rock layers and the fossils found therein. I am not a geologist. My father was/is and taught me to look for the information contained in rocks. Standing before this light grey, greenish, brownish and light tan cliff, I was able to use the information to, in my own mind, reconstruct an area no human ever saw.

Yet you claim that information is not there. That information cannot be created through natural processes. You are mistaken.

No one would ever argue that the code behind a complex piece of software could originate randomly

You’re aware that there’s a whole field called evolutionary computation, right? Heard of genetic programming?

(Of course, there’s no “randomly” about it, but neither is biological evolution random.)

A message written in sand changes not any physical properties of the sand prior to rearrangement.

Except it does. It changes the coordinates of the sand grains. You’ve been told that already. Coordinates are very important when you’re studying a system from a physical point of view, and when they change you can’t say nothing changed physically. Because it did. So, shall we add physics to the list of stuff you should learn about before trying to discuss it with people much better educated than you?

In San Antonio, there is a restaurant called LuLu’s that sells the world’s largest cinnamon bun. The behemoth weighs in at over three pounds. Over the years many people have eaten one such cinnamon bun behemoth in a single sitting.

Little known fact about Bob Enyart.

He is the only person to have eaten two of these in one sitting. He washed down the meal with more than a gallon of lime koolaid. Medics standing by have sworn that his blood sugar remained within normal range.

Of course, when you create your own definition, everything is everything.

It’s so funny that you can’t grasp the fact that you are the one here who created your own definition of information. Information is a technical term of information theory, which you have so far completely refused to even try to learn.

Even a message on a beach consisting of just 3 letters (SOS) would be acknowledged by everyone here as “design”.

Yeah, but what does that have to do with anything?

And no one in their right mind would claim that given enough time, Mt. Rushmore would happen as a result of wind, rain and erosion.

Yeah, but what does that have to do with anything?

See, your problem is that you’re forgetting (or pretending to forget) about this powerful natural process that life (and evolutionary algorithms!) demonstrably undergoes but mountains, patches of sand and fridge magnets don’t. It’s called natural selection. If you could come up with a natural mechanism by which Mt. Rushmore couldwould be expected to form the way Darwin came up with a natural mechanism by which non-perfect self-replicators are expected to evolve and grow more complex over time, people “in their right mind” could well claim that.

This discussion has nothing to do with information. It is all about your misunderstandings of evolutionary theory.

It’s always interesting to see where the atheist will go when confronted with a challenge.

You aren’t a challenge.

The second choice is insane statements like “the laws of logic don’t exist” or “everything is information”.

“That seems crazy to me” isn’t an argument. You’ve been given references, and you’ve ignored them. Those of us who actually spend time studying science understand that it isn’t always neat and intuitive.

I seriously hope that everyone here would acknowlege that there’s a difference between random letters on a fridge and a designed informative message with those letters.

Everyone here understands the difference between the message that a human writes with letters, and information present in a random jumble of letters. We just dispute the idea that an intelligent actor is necessary for information to be present.

A message written in sand changes not any physical properties of the sand prior to rearrangement

This is the problem with talking to you, in a nutshell. If you’d had even a high school level physics class you would understand that position is a physical property. If I move a grain of sand I’ve changed its physical properties. If I move it further away from the center of the earth in the process I’ve changed its energy.

You seem to know nothing about the things you want to talk about, and then when people try to lead you to information, you respond with “of course this is all just jesus magic: anything else would be weird”.

Why shouldn’t people use vulgarity against someone so unremittingly stubborn as yourself; who refuses to learn, and refuses to acknowledge error?

The second choice is insane statements like “the laws of logic don’t exist” or “everything is information”.

Everything does indeed have information, and it is insane to deny this simple fact, and it’s insane to call a fact insane.

Of course, when you create your own definition, everything is everything.

*eyeroll*

No one said that everything had the same information. Even otherwise identical subatomic particles have different positions and velocities.

My original example included information that was a message created by intelligent design. There was no physical evidence that it was created by intelligent design

Because the process of creating the message, and the message itself, are magically not physical?

And no one here would claim it happened by natural processes.

I hope you’re not claiming that humans are not natural.

And I seriously hope that everyone here would acknowlege that there’s a difference between random letters on a fridge and a designed informative message with those letters.

Notice that you can strike the term “informative” and the phrase has the same meaning.

Are you weakening on your stance that “information” and “designed message” mean the same thing?

No one would ever argue that the code behind a complex piece of software could originate randomly, yet they do with the even more complex code behind life.

That “complex code” shows no sign of being a “designed message”. You fail utterly in showing that it is. In fact, by your own definition, it cannot possibly be a designed message, because it is not written in any human language.

Even a message on a beach consisting of just 3 letters (SOS) would be acknowledged by everyone here as “design”

That’s because we’re generally smart enough to distinguish between processes caused by humans, and those caused by non-humans or non-human forces.

But life is not made of letters. It’s made of molecules, and gives every sign of having evolved by natural selection; by completely non-human forces.

And no one in their right mind would claim that given enough time, Mt. Rushmore would happen as a result of wind, rain and erosion.

I’m glad that you agree that Creationists like you are not in their right mind. After all, you claim that “a pile of rocks” — like Mount Rushmore — has no information, and therefore must not be intelligently designed.

Haha! You shot yourself in the foot again!

A message written in sand changes not any physical properties of the sand prior to rearrangement.

The stupidity in this has already been addressed. I mean, really? The sand doesn’t move when it’s moved?

yesyouneedjesus actually said “Random 1s and 0s are not information” and “A pile of rocks is not information”, and then whined about Mount Rushmore.

After thinking about it a bit, I think I would agree that information qua information is completely nonphysical, since it’s just an abstraction about physical properties. It is literally metadata. However, any attempt to store or process information is necessarily physical. This would be a form of computation, and computation necessarily involves, at the very least, an energy transaction.

I skimmed Feynman’s “Thermodynamics of Computation” (he discusses DNA transcription, by the way), and he suggests that energy costs of computation can be made arbitrarily low — by making the computation extremely slow. Hm.

Well, all computation that is actually done, and this of course includes the process of perceiving, learning, and practicing spoken and written language, is done rapidly enough that it does indeed take a lot of energy, especially given the physiological furnace that is the human brain. It’s just that Creobots don’t take into account the perception, learning, or practicing processes when thinking about “designed messages”. There’s not just the energy used by one individual, either. Language evolves in a society and culture, and the culture that uses language goes back millenia, all of the humans involved using quite a bit of energy to transmit the spoken and written language to the next generation.

In addition, there’s the point that the human brain has evolved to parse and learn symbols and language. The exact process isn’t exactly clear, but that too involved quite a lot of energy used over time. And we could probably go back even further; to the earlier ancestors that evolved perceptions and the ability to make sense of the environment, and even further back yet to everything that resulted in those organisms evolving.

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratchwrite a line of text in the sand, you must first invent the universe. (h/t Carl Sagan)

Of course, when you create your own definition, everything is everything.

says the guy who is still refusing to use the correct definition of “information” from nformation theory, instead of the made-up one his authority gave him.

My original example included information that was a message created by intelligent design. There was no physical evidence that it was created by intelligent design

of course there was evidence. Given the existence of a child in the household, a short amount of time, and no other means for letters to rearrange themslves, any rearrangement of the letters would have likely been made by the child, but especially when they become arranged into things that carry symbolic meaning.

You clearly don’t know what evidence is, either.

And no one here would claim it happened by natural processes.

I know you folks have problems with this concept, but humans are natural. They’re part of nature, not supernatural.

And I seriously hope that everyone here would acknowlege that there’s a difference between random letters on a fridge and a designed informative message with those letters.

sure. for the former, the coordinates of the letters are different than for the latter, and the latter carries symbolic meaning to those who speak the language. but both still carry information, and pretty much the same amount of it.

No one would ever argue that the code behind a complex piece of software could originate randomly

another thing you know nothing about. Functional code has been written by evolutionary processes for years now.

I don’t understand.

that’s because you’re (wilfully) ignorant about every subject you’ve broached so far.

Even a message on a beach consisting of just 3 letters (SOS) would be acknowledged by everyone here as “design”.

1)I get “SOS” arrangements by random chance and accident all the time. Have you never eaten alphabet soup, ffs? the actual “SOS” signal is actual a regular pattern of three short and three long beeps. regular patterns are often thought to come from intelligence, but that’s often wrong. see: discovery of pulsars.

And of course information itself is not physical.

it really doesn’t matter how many times you say this, it’s not going to stop being incorrect. information is definitely physical. even symbolic meaning ultimately is, since it’s physical activity of a physical brain.

A message written in sand changes not any physical properties of the sand prior to rearrangement.

incorrect. it changes its coordinates.

– – – – – – –

You’ve confused transcription and translation.

*headdesk* I completely missed that.

ditto. and considering I was talking about peptide chains, which have nothing to do with transcription, you’d think I would have *sigh*

My original example included information that was a message created by intelligent design. There was no physical evidence that it was created by intelligent design, but no one here would deny that fact. And no one here would claim it happened by natural processes.

Of course it happened by natural processes, because human cognition and action are natural processes.

And I seriously hope that everyone here would acknowlege that there’s a difference between random letters on a fridge and a designed informative message with those letters.

Of course, but the difference does not lie in the amount of information needed to specify their positions.

No one would ever argue that the code behind a complex piece of software could originate randomly, yet they do with the even more complex code behind life.

Yet another creationist lie. Evolutionary processes are most definitely not random, although they contain random elements. The genetic code is not absolutely the same across all life, and there are indications that it has selective advantages over possible alternatives, and may have evolved from a simpler code, in which two codons rather than three specified an amino acid. A good non-technical account of some of this can be found in chapter 2 of Nick Lane’s Life Ascending. But of course, you won’t read it, because you are utterly determined to remain ignorant, as you have proved repeatedly in this thread.

Fucking, fuck! Would you kindly pick an argument and clearly state it? This thread has pretty much shredded the vague attempts you’ve made at argumentation, but you haven’t even picked a direction to go with your argument yet. We all know it ends with jebus, but how do you propose to get there while prattling on about information? You tried a gotcha question, got slammed, pointed to the correct definition of the word you were abusing and you’re still desperately clinging to the shattered remnants of your rhetoric.

Not that it matters, but thermodynamics has nothing to do with Newton.

Shhhhh, it was a subtle way to gauge liarforjesus’s knowledge on the subject. As you see, ze didn’t even notice the substitution.

Like carbon, silicon could support lengthy polymers

No, only quite short ones, and even then only at very low temperatures (which slow everything down rather drastically) and in the absence of things like molecular oxygen.

This is probably a very ignorant question, but would Boron be able to support lengthy polymers at low temperatures?

On a small scale, you can get close enough.

I must ask…How does one recreate asteroid bombardment on a small scale?
—-

This is one of my favorite things about Pharyngula. I so appreciate it when people explain how things like transcription and translation work on a mechanical level, interspersed with Ogvorbis’s lovely geology 101.

Boron is not as versatile an element as carbon for fostering chemical diversity however, because it lacks a full octet in a trivalent configuration, and it has a negative charge in a tetravalent configuration. This leads most boron compounds to be somewhat unstable. Boron compounds containing oxygen and nitrogen tend to be the most stable of the bunch, while B2H6 and BX3 compounds (where X is a halogen) are nasty.

Of course it happened by natural processes, because human cognition and action are natural processes.

I know you folks have problems with this concept, but humans are natural. They’re part of nature, not supernatural.

of course there was evidence. Given the existence of a child in the household, a short amount of time, and no other means for letters to rearrange themslves, any rearrangement of the letters would have likely been made by the child, but especially when they become arranged into things that carry symbolic meaning.

When did I ever say a human being did it? Everyone here has come to the conclusion that the rearrangement of the letters on the fridge was intelligently designed? Why did you come to that conclusion? Please explain.

Quote it exactly, with a reference to the comment number. And quote it in context.

So if only intelligence can create information, please explain why I, and many others, can get so much information from the arrangement of limestone, sandstone, siltstone, conglomerate and mudstone in a cliff? (for details, read my #292). No intelligence involved, but shitloads of information.

So if only intelligence can create information, please explain why I, and many others, can get so much information from…

Everyone here keeps confusing information itself from the ability to extract information from something. When you have data, you can extract information. But data and information are different. Data can happen randomly, but information is the result of INTENT.

If you’d had even a high school level physics class you would understand that position is a physical property.

But the information does not rely on either the medium nor location of the medium. Information, truth, laws of logic, etc. are not physical. Anyone can attempt to explain how truth is physical, but they will end up denying that truth exists. That’s what happens with atheists like Nerd of Redhead.

Can someone please explain why people on this blog are telling me that evolution is not random? The main mechanism is random mutation, is it not?

I would love to!

First, the main mechanism is natural selection. All organisms have random mutations. Most mutations are harmful, and result in the organism dying. Some mutations are benign, and don’t seem to effect the organism. Some mutations are beneficial.

(this is a very general outline of genetic mutation)

Evolution is not random, because it is directly related to selection pressures. I will give you an example.

In a book on common herbs that was written in 1876, the description of the common dandelion is given as:

a herbaceous perennial having an upright growth habit, deep taproot, and yellow blooms

I will assume that you have seen a dandelion plant, and are aware that their leaves form a ground hugging rosette.

What selection pressure has occurred in the last 130 years that would select for low foliage? The answer is lawn mowers.

of course there was evidence. Given the existence of a child in the household, a short amount of time, and no other means for letters to rearrange themslves, any rearrangement of the letters would have likely been made by the child, but especially when they become arranged into things that carry symbolic meaning.

When did I ever say a human being did it? Everyone here has come to the conclusion that the rearrangement of the letters on the fridge was intelligently designed? Why did you come to that conclusion? Please explain.

just quoting this because of how hilarious it is that twerp is asking for an explanation while quoting one.

Can someone please explain why people on this blog are telling me that evolution is not random?

because it isn’t. the main mechanism in evolution is natural selection, which isn’t random.

Another huge problem for atheists

not in the slightest. you see, atheism is based on the lack of evidence for deities (basically, atheism is the Null Hypothesis). It doesn’t actually have anything to do with biology or biochemistry at all.

Can anyone prove to me with evidence that the Rosetta stone was intelligently designed and not the result of random natural processes?

it’s simply unparsimonious to assume that a stone with three kinds of symbolic meanings would have been created at a time and place where people who spoke these three languages existed. Basically, the evidence for the existence of these people, and the existence of the specific sets of symbolic meaning being created by humans is evidence for the Rosetta stone being artificial. It doesn’t work the other way ’round. random, or even patterned, markings in a rock are not inherently evidence for being made by intelligence.

But data and information are different.

repeating this is not going to make it truer. in information theory, data is information, and information is data.

Data can happen randomly, but information is the result of INTENT.

incorrect. data = information, and therefore is present in everything. symbolic meaning is the result of highly enough developed cognition (not intent), but the symbolic meaning is not part of the medium; it exists in the brains of the critters with the highly developed brains.

But the information does not rely on either the medium nor location of the medium.

incorrect. both the medium and the location are information.

Information, truth, laws of logic, etc. are not physical.

incorrect. data is always physical, but even human-made ideas and concepts are ultimately physical, since they exist as part of a working human brain. ideas are, ultimately, physical and chemical.

Anyone can attempt to explain how truth is physical, but they will end up denying that truth exists.

the idea of truth obviously exists, but ultimately it exists as part of human brains, not external to it. it’s a social construct.

No one would ever argue that the code behind a complex piece of software could originate randomly

The game F.E.A.R has units that strafe the enemy. Strafing is not actually a coded behavior. It’s a fortunate emergent behavior from two separate behavior programs. It’s preserved because it generates a positive result for the programs, and that trick is probably going to be considered in the future. I.E. programing via random natural selection.

The laws of logic the atheist use are general and do exist. What a lair and bullshitter if you can’t see that distinction. And still no evidence presented for your imaginary deity. That tacitly tells us you know it doesn’t exist, or that you can only presuppose, not evidence, said deity. Which means if you have real honesty and integrity, you shut the fuck up about it, and cease pretending it exists in all your arguments.

7-25: Both of you blogged about the “no contest” debate. Aron wrote, that Bob Enyart’s “next submission ought to be interesting whatever it is…”

8-14: We posted on the debate forum, “Please feel free to ask AronRa if he’d like to set a limit between posts, say, 48 hours or one week [as I think I originally had proposed], and perhaps a limit of 10 rounds (I’m about to post Round 6.) ”

And as for the undeserved praise you gave me in the OP (I myself did NOT write the 1st and 2nd laws of thermodynamics; you’d have to credit other creationists for that, like James Joule and Lord Kelvin), I did however debate the subject and the author of the Am. Jour. of Phys article, Entropy and Evolution, Dan Styer, joined in the debate via the comment thread at our church website, all of which you can find at http://realsciencefriday.com/entropy

In that debate, I did respectfully correct two serious related errors made by creationist Henry Morris on the topic.

And as for the undeserved praise you gave me in the OP (I myself did NOT write the 1st and 2nd laws of thermodynamics; you’d have to credit other creationists for that, like James Joule and Lord Kelvin)

In our debate AronRa was a dinosaur soft tissue denier (something common on your site PZ)

Seeing as the dinosaur tissues in question have all been independently dated by multiple lines of corroborating evidence to ages greater than 65 million years, and the mere fact of its possible existence does not and in fact cannot, in any way shape or form, call those independently verified ages in question, what side AronRa stands on that particularly interesting scientific controversy is completely irrelevant to the debate referenced to.

Even trying to bring up the dinosaur soft tissue question in the context of that debate was either a ludicrously stupid own-goal or breathtakingly dishonest attempt at deflection.

If the theory of evolution were not broadly true, the fossils would never have even been found at all, let alone be investigated for potential soft tissue preservation, as they can exist in the places where they were found if and only if the theory of evolution is broadly true. In fact, paleontologists directly use the theory of evolution to predict where they should look to find fossils.

bobenyart and the other creos harping on the dinosaur soft tissues don’t seem to realize that the location of every fossil in existence is, each individual one, a piece of evidence demonstrating the validity of evolutionary theory.

You bring up ANY existing fossil when trying to debate against evolution, you LOSE, immediately.

I myself did NOT write the 1st and 2nd laws of thermodynamics; you’d have to credit other creationists for that, like James Joule and Lord Kelvin

The fact that you wrote this makes my head explode. Can you even state those laws in your own words, or did you just name-drop them because you are under the pathetic misapprehension that it makes you look smart?

Its also blindingly hilarious that you would bring up Lord Kelvin. Did you know that he calculated the age of the earth to be between 20 and 400 million years old* based on thermodynamics? How does that result square with your iron age goat-herder mythology, Bob?

*he got the wrong number because he failed to account for energy from the (then unknown) phenomenon of radioactivity

Can someone please explain why people on this blog are telling me that evolution is not random?

Because it isn’t and you’re implying it is.

And why are you still pretending to forget about natural selection?

And of course everyone is conveniently ignoring abiogenesis.

No, no one except for you is conveniently ignoring anything. It’s just that you hadn’t yet brought up that topic, so there was no need to address it.

Another huge problem for atheists

Not really. More like a challenge for prebiotic chemists to have some fun with. :)

considering they have neither mutation nor natural selection.

Well, that depends on how you define life. Wanna take a stab at it?

But data and information are different. Data can happen randomly, but information is the result of INTENT.

Why are you still talking about information while completely (and conveniently) ignoring the existence of this whole field called information theory? Wasn’t it you who said “Everyone should become familiar with information before attempting to discuss it.“, hypocrite?

ditto. and considering I was talking about peptide chains, which have nothing to do with transcription, you’d think I would have *sigh*

You just had to find a way to make yourself look bad, eh? :-) I overlooked comment 286 yesterday!

No one would ever argue that the code behind a complex piece of software could originate randomly, yet they do with the even more complex code behind life.

You have no idea what a mess a genome is. Intelligent design is something else.

I must ask…How does one recreate asteroid bombardment on a small scale?

I’d say you occasionally take a sample of what’s brewing in your experimental setup, squeeze and heat it beyond all reason, and then put it back in.

boron nitride polymers are known

Boron nitride is awesome. It’s… like… artificial carbon.

The downside is that it doesn’t occur in nature. Boron forms borates (with oxygen and metals), and nitrogen forms an atmosphere.

And of course everyone is conveniently ignoring abiogenesis. Another huge problem for atheists considering they have neither mutation nor natural selection.

Evolution is descent with heritable modification. So, it can only start once there is something that can replicate itself.

It logically follows that the theory of evolution cannot and does not say anything on how that first self-replicator arose. That’s a question for the chemists to answer… and they’ve come pretty far.

Can anyone prove to me with evidence that the Rosetta stone was intelligently designed and not the result of random natural processes?

“Prove” is a strong word, you know. So strong that most scientists practically never use it, unless they’re talking about math.

Intelligent design is the most parsimonious assumption for the origin of the Rosetta Stone: we know from observation that people can do such things, and not only were there people in the time and place that it comes from, they used exactly those two languages and three scripts.

Evolution is not an option, because carved stones don’t reproduce.

information is the result of INTENT

Dude, as I’ve told you, information is a technical term. The information theorists own this word; they get to define what it means, not you.

First, the main mechanism is natural selection. All organisms have random mutations. Most mutations are harmful, and result in the organism dying. Some mutations are benign, and don’t seem to effect the organism. Some mutations are beneficial.

The vast majority of mutations, in fact, has no effect whatsoever; those mutations are neutral. Of the rest, most are harmful to some extent – death or other kinds of infertility are only the extreme. Still, there are beneficial ones. And keep in mind that, as you’ll see below, it depends on the environment whether a mutation is harmful or beneficial; natural selection right there.

In a book on common herbs that was written in 1876, the description of the common dandelion is given as:

a herbaceous perennial having an upright growth habit, deep taproot, and yellow blooms

I will assume that you have seen a dandelion plant, and are aware that their leaves form a ground hugging rosette.

What selection pressure has occurred in the last 130 years that would select for low foliage? The answer is lawn mowers.

So it wasn’t random. Does that make sense to you?

There have long been ground-hugging dandelions. This mutation used to be harmful, because ground-huggers get less light than plants which tower over the grass. Lawnmowers have changed this: now, the ground-huggers survive, and the others don’t. Tall dandelions still exist, indeed they’re fairly common, just not on lawns that are mowed all the time.

It’s important to mention that lawnmowers didn’t cause any mutation. They only made an existing mutation beneficial.

It doesn’t actually have anything to do with biology or biochemistry at all.

Except insofar as those sciences happen to have failed to falsify the hypothesis that there aren’t any gods.

thought I saw longer posts with more links though…

There’s no limit on comment length. There is a limit on the number of links: anything with more than 5 links gets stuck in moderation.

There are comments with more than 5 links; every one of them is only up because PZ happened to have time to let them out of moderation. Most of what’s in the moderation queue never gets out, simply because PZ is too busy.

I did however debate the subject and the author of the Am. Jour. of Phys article, Entropy and Evolution, Dan Styer, joined in the debate via the comment thread at our church website, all of which you can find at http://realsciencefriday.com/entropy

But the information does not rely on either the medium nor location of the medium. Information, truth, laws of logic, etc. are not physical. Anyone can attempt to explain how truth is physical, but they will end up denying that truth exists

In order to have the kind of written message you were talking about you need a medium capable of inscribing a regular geometric pattern (a string of letters or characters). When you make the inscription you will change the physical properties of the medium (usually by introducing pigment that interacts with light differently than the medium itself; but there are other ways as well). In order for your message to mean anything it will need to be interpreted by the brain of someone who has learned to interpret the language you used.

That you can use different physical processes to transmit information is unimportant; the fact is you need one.

The ability to recognize and decode information is something that happens in your brain. Its also a physical process.

The laws of logic exist in your brain (or maybe everyone else’s brains except yours personally). They are abstractions that came about through inductive study of the material world. You may have been taught logic as though it was something alien and transcendental, however we arrived at logic through observation of the structure and behavior of the universe.

Finally information isn’t the same thing as truth. Why the inability to stay on topic?